Sri Aurobindo

Letters of Sri Aurobindo

Volume I - Part 5

Fragment ID: 10753

What is exactly your theory? There is one thing – influences – everybody undergoes influences, absorbs them or rejects, makes them disappear in one’s own developed [poetic] style or else keeps them as constituent strands. There is another thing – lines of Force. In the universe there are many lines of Force on which various personalities or various achievements and formations spring up – e.g. the line Pericles – Caesar –Napoleon or the line Alexander – Jenghiz –Tamerlane – Napoleon – meeting together there – so it may be too in poetry, lines of poetic force prolonging themselves from one poet to another, meeting and diverging. Yours seems to be a third – a daemon or individual Spirit of Poetry migrating from one individual to another, several perhaps meeting together in one poet who gives them all a combined full expression. Is that it? If so, it is an interesting idea and arguable.